/lit/ - Literature

>>16504261
Start here, friend

Damascius Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles

>>16504282
that book costs like 120 dollars

>SOCRATES: But it is not possible, Theodorus, that evil should be destroyed—for there must always be something opposed to the good; nor is it possible that it should have its seat in heaven. But it must inevitably haunt human life, and prowl about this earth. That is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven; and escape means becoming [b] as like God as possible; and a man becomes like God when he becomes just and pious, with understanding. But it is not at all an easy matter, my good friend, to persuade men that it is not for the reasons commonly alleged that one should try to escape from wickedness and pursue virtue. It is not in order to avoid a bad reputation and obtain a good one that virtue should be practiced and not vice; that, it seems to me, is only what [c] men call ‘old wives’ talk’. Let us try to put the truth in this way. In God there is no sort of wrong whatsoever; he is supremely just, and the thing most like him is the man who has become as just as it lies in human nature to be. And it is here that we see whether a man is truly able, or truly a weakling and a nonentity; for it is the realization of this that is genuine wisdom and goodness, while the failure to realize it is manifest folly and wickedness. Everything else that passes for ability and wisdom has a sort of commonness—in those who wield political power a poor cheap show, in the manual workers a matter of mechanical routine. If, therefore, one meets a man who practices [d] injustice and is blasphemous in his talk or in his life, the best thing for him by far is that one should never grant that there is any sort of ability about his unscrupulousness; such men are ready enough to glory in the reproach, and think that it means not that they are mere rubbish, cumbering the ground to no purpose, but that they have the kind of qualities that are necessary for survival in the community. We must therefore tell them the truth—that their very ignorance of their true state fixes them the more firmly therein. For they do not know what is the penalty of injustice, which is the last thing of which a man should be ignorant. It is not what they suppose—scourging and death—things which they may entirely evade in spite of their wrongdoing. It is a penalty from which there is no escape

>>16504261
we wuz gods and shiet

>>16504482
Use Libgen retard

>>16504261
Basically, the core idea is that God is an abstraction -- even in its most thoroughly examined state -- from an experiential intuition that all things are one, that we are little noumenal slices carved out of oneness and encased in phenomena. If every individual human being is carved out of and composed by the same material, then we can set aside the distinctions between individual human beings in the context of self vs. other and examine what separates self from God. For brevity's sake, it follows that the interactions of the phenomenal world with the noumenal, absolute reality together form a force which is indistinguishable from God. Religion gets tangled down in questions of intelligent design, but under the transcendentalist model, our own self-reaffirming human experiences signify the existence of intelligent design -- as individual expressions of God, our own intelligent designs are God's intelligent designs. It's the only rational conclusion to the whole debate. Who created the universe? We did, all the way back at the big bang, and we'll continue to do so after the last human is dead, because we're all just sticking our heads out for a brief minute above the surface of an experiential sea, from which we were born, and to which we'll return.

>>16504776
huh

>>16504776
why are we sticking our heads above the surface?

>>16504261
Mormons take it to the natural conclusion that humanity becomes God's themselves.

>>16507106
how so?

>>16504261
Alan Watts is a good start.

But this is basically what buddhism and to an extent hinduism is all about. Check out Zen stuff.

>there is no metaphysical difference between God and an awakened man
I've never seen anyone claim this. It's always that there's no difference between God and all men.

>>16504261
Yeah, I'm starting to see he was definitely God. I've jerked off so many times to his face.

>>16507590
They say his face is so long because his brain is in another dimension

>>16507539
for the unawakened man it is virtual, for the awakened man it is actual

Future Christ by Laruelle has some very interesting things to say about this. I'd recommend making yourself familiar with his system beforehand, though. That book mostly assumes you've read other things by him first.

>>16504261
Read for instant enlightenment:
Consciousness of the unreal is all there is. When you know consciousness of the unreal is the only thing everything has in common, and you're conscious of this, you become the god-mind. It's not that Godconsciousness and the enlightened person are identical, but that their identity is analogical from a solipsistic standpoint. Physical attributes become secondary attributes when you only recognize the consciousness of them as true and real. The world becomes a mirror because the consciousness of the object disappears along with the notion of the object; You are the consciousness of the object and realize yourself as the consciousness of the object and realize that everything always has been consciousness of object.